Suit Aims To Block Highway Projects

Environmental Groups Plan Suit To Halt Highway Projects

September 23, 1992|By STEVE GRANT; Courant Staff Writer

Six environmental groups said Tuesday they will sue to block highway projects in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, claiming the states have failed to adopt programs that would reduce automobile traffic and help clear the air in the region.

The groups said the departments of transportation in the three states had failed to meet requirements in the revised Clean Air Act adopted by Congress two years ago.

"The law required them to come in and prove that their plans would lead to fewer emissions than automobiles caused in 1990, and they didn't do that," said Michael Stern, a staff attorney with the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, a private advocacy organization and one of the six plaintiffs.

Three separate lawsuits, among the earliest under the revised act, will be filed in federal district courts in Bridgeport, Newark and New York City, the groups said. They said they filed Tuesday a 60-day notice of their intent to sue, as the act requires.

The other five groups involved are the Conservation Law Foundation, based in Boston; the Environmental Defense Fund, based in New York; the New Jersey Environmental Lobby; the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group; and the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions.

The groups said the suit would seek to stop highway projects in the three states until the agencies involved revised their transportation programs to comply with the law. The three states have hundreds of millions in highway projects pending or planned.

Connecticut officials had no comment. "We just received the notice and haven't had a chance to review it," said Sue Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.

New York authorities, however, disagreed sharply with the groups' claims.

"We don't understand what this lawsuit is all about," said David Murray, a spokesman for the New York Department of Transportation. "New York state for some years has had a mobility goal which is aimed at getting people out of their cars and into

public transportation. ... We have pioneered in such things as traffic-systems management and high-occupancy vehicle lanes."

Because motor vehicles are a major source of ozone and carbon-monoxide pollution, the revised act requires state and regional transportation planners to ensure that transportation projects help reduce air pollution, specifically by reducing auto emissions.

"All three states and their local planning agencies continue to fund transportation programs that will lead to increased air pollution, rather than less," the groups said.

Specifically, the groups said, the states failed to provide alternatives so people would not have to drive back and forth to work.

"We need to increase investment in an expanded regional mass-transit system and take measures that make single-occupant vehicles pay for the congestion and auto pollution that they cause," said James Tripp, the defense fund's general counsel